Friday, April 06, 2012
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James Hansen will give lectures in Scotland where he is also going to pick the Edinburgh Medal. It doesn't look like an important award but the orientation of the winners in recent years is still very annoying if you realize that the first medalist, one in 1989, was Abdus Salam. Imagine the trend if you start with Salam and end with Hansen.

Arguably the only person in the world who has earned a million of dollars out of being a small fish criminal. He's proud about it and he's selling his recidivist credentials to small cells of organized crime (particularly "environmentalist organizations") very efficiently.

The climate change propaganda is a "great moral issue on par with slavery". Nice.

One may interpret those words by saying that he is eager to launch a civil war in the U.S. because of his pseudoscientific delusions and quasi-religious passions. Well, let's hope that the more sensible, pro-market and pro-freedom side would win again.

One could argue that the losing side had a better anthem.

The Guardian article says that Hansen wants an ever growing global flat carbon tax. Cool. They also refer to the following preprint by Hansen and 17 Yes-persons:

That's quite a title for the arXiv.ORG server that otherwise focuses on scientific papers rather than Marxist rants that only have one scientific component, namely the first word in their title.

The article is full of "pipelines" and similar fashionable buzzwords. You should also notice that the focus on the "young people" is irrational as well because if there were any problem, it would affect people of all ages and maybe especially the old ones. What they really want to say is that they managed to brainwash many inexperienced, young people, so they're trying to be their defenders. But the facts offer nothing to support any of Hansen's major propositions.

Hansen is telling us the usual rubbish about "destructive consequences" that one generation "stores up for another" which is "unjust". These big words are amazing given the fact that he hasn't provided us with a glimpse of evidence that there is any problem that could be discussed at all. Moreover, even if there were a threat for the climate or anything else, it would be nonsensical to establish this "intergenerational justice".

One can't do unjustice to people who don't exist at the moment of the act. The environment into which one is born is a defining part of his or her identity. One can't rebuild the rule of law around hypothetical consequences of people's acts in the far future. One may only be punished – or labeled as a culprit of injustice – for something that has actually occurred in the past. That follows from causality or the arrow of time, if you wish. Everyone can make investments for his offspring or hypothetical future descendants. It's a form of a speculative investment. But one can't blame someone for stealing something from the people who will be born in the future because the people obviously don't possess anything before they exist. James Hansen misunderstands ownership, causality, the scheme of the world, everything. He is a loon.

I am not really afraid that Hansen's lunacies such as a global carbon tax could become reality but I admit that I feel sufficiently uncertain about the impossibility of this lunacy that these words still worry me. There are pretty incredible hacks in the European Union, for example.

People around Hansen have stopped interacting with scientists or sensible people in general many years ago. They're not even trying to hide anymore that they have switched from attempts to find valid answers to scientific questions – a challenge in which they have failed miserably – to pure political activism. Hansen also wants to introduce a global government:

Under the global carbon tax proposal, the mechanisms for controlling fossil fuel use would be taken out of the hands of individual states influenced by energy companies, and politicians anxious about winning elections.

Can you imagine how such a thing could possibly work so that it would be anything else than a global dictatorship? How would this international carbon tax agency behave if they were told the truth, namely that they're stinky thugs and thieves who should f*ck off and who won't be given another penny? Would they also have a police or army to fight against the dissatisfied? Does Hansen expect that individual nations will dedicate their army to an international junta whose very open goal is to cripple the nations' sovereignty and take the power of human fates from the people, something he explicitly states? Has he lost his mind completely? If you're a maniac who wants to get a control over the mankind against its will, you will have to shoot through all the gates yourself.

What he wants to deconstruct are the very pillars of the civilization and he must be treated on par with people like Adolf Hitler.

I don't know about other countries but I am confident that if he actually started to dilute sovereignty of the Czech Republic, there would be a political near-consensus in my country that he has become as legitimate a target of special operations as Reinhard Heydrich who had very similar goals and who had to be executed by the Czechoslovak government. Comments like "one has to take the power to control their territory" from the individual nations is just something you shouldn't have ever spitted from your dirty mouth, Mr Hansen. These are very serious matters you should better not joke about.

I urge Mr Hansen to apologize for this unacceptable language. People in the U.S. may tolerate this kind of stuff but there may be other nations in the world that won't, Mr Hansen.

The comparison with slavery is particularly ironic because Hansen's plan to introduce a global tax is nothing else than a form of slavery, a method for a self-appointed groups of alarmists to steal money from those who actually work, from those who are creating the values for mankind which often if not usually requires to emit CO2, the gas we call life, along the way, and to force them to work even more intensely in order to compensate for the money lost through the tax.

Fešáci: Matterhorn. They started from Bern or CERN in the morning, accompanied by the ringing bells. Their aim was to be lucky and conquer Matterhorn...

Matterhorn crumbling due to AGW

This story has actually circulated through the Czech media. Too bad. See ABC:

Rockfall from permafrost mountain slopes depends on the climate. It's poorly understood but we study it, put a few wireless sensors to the slopes of Matternhorn and [here a miracle occurs] find out that tenths of a degree of warming will make Matterhorn collapse. It's just like a steak in a hot oven with a frozen butter on it, we hear.

Holy cow. This is stupid beyond words.

In reality, the occasional melting of the ice on the surface has actually been what has driven the growth of the mountain – which used to be just a round hill – but it still took millions of years. The Alpine orogeny took place in the Late Mesozoic, more than 65 million years ago. Whole ice ages and interglacials that took tens of thousands of years – with their 8 °C temperature variations – were just small episodes in the formation of Matterhorn's shape. The articles want to make the readers believe that one half of Matternhorn will be gone by 2013 if not 2012.

Today, it's been exactly 2/3 of a century after Hiroshima. Hat tip: O.M.